My time in creole hell

Everyone I know -- myself included -- complains from time to time about the way they make their living. From Wall St. types and freelancers to punk rockers and models, no one has a completely positive outlook about their work. I guess that's because each occupation offers its own special case of the mindfucks.

For the most part, I like what I do for work. It does not require me to wake up early or to dress up when I don't feel like it, and I can take care of the vast majority of my responsibilities from home. So really, though I bitch about my work from time to time, I really don't have a major quarrel with it.

Perhaps this is because whenever I get tired or frustrated or feel that something is unfair, I compare my current gig with the lost summer I spent waitressing at a creole restaurant at a resort. I took the job in part because I was bored, but mostly because my mom hated me loafing around all the time tanning, and my dad was getting tired of me stealing his Coronas to take with me out to the dock while engaging in said tanning. I had never waitressed before and figured it wouldn't be very hard, and low and behold, it wasn't.

But what it was was taxing. And tedious. And a little degrading. Every day, I drove my BMW -- pasted indecorously with an employee parking sticker -- past the guard at the security gate to a little dirty parking lot and waited for a little dirty bus to take me the rest of the way to work. The air was nauseatingly hot and heavy, and the thick black pants I was forced to purchase from Wal-Mart morphed my legs into cheaply-clothed chimneys. The managers of the restaurant -- my bosses, if you will -- were a oozing pasty man with owl glasses who fancied himself some sort of Machiavellian dictator and a wiry girl with a Julia Roberts smile who had graduated two years ahead of me at my high school. She would have been very pretty had she not been so rough around the edges*.

*a week after i ended my commitment at the restaurant, this girl and i got into an argument that escalated into a fist fight at a bar, where she mopped the floor with me. i cried the whole way home in the car.

My co-workers were an odd assembly of burnt-out locals and Eastern Europeans who spoke limited English that the resort must have recruited for the summer. Once, I used the term "canoodling" around one of my foreign colleagues, and she informed me that it "sounds dirty, like-a animals fucking". The idea of tourists coming to the restaurant for a "genuine" Southern experience and being waited on by someone from the old Soviet Bloc never failed to make me smile.

One of the more colorful locals was a girl named Cara, a single mother twice over whose sage philosophy on men was "same shit, different toliet". She downed chewed up Midols to cure her hangovers. She always seemed to get stuck with the particularly distasteful side-work job of cleaning the tea and coffee dispensers and, upon seeing her name listed for this task yet again, bellowed out, "Stick me with teas and coffees just one more time, and I'm gonna stab someone with a prime rib knife".

At first, I made a conscious effort to separate myself from the rest of the employees. I spent the summer wearing 2 karat diamond earrings and a disdainful scowl. Once, after a particularly heinous disagreement with my amorphous blob of a manager, I threw my wadded up tip money at him, claiming I didn't need it anyway.*

*certainly not my finest hour.

But as time passed, I began to acclimate, and my fellow co-workers and the parolees who worked in the kitchen began to take a shine to me. My last day of work, two of them invited me to their house between my morning and night shifts. Between the three of us, we killed all the beer in the fridge, and I was just getting started on a bottle of Aristocrat vodka when I noticed a giant, coiled up snake in a cage. I am unequivocally terrified of snakes.

"Is that a real snake there?" I slurred.

"Yep. Sure is. Haw haw. Once, our friend JoAnne passed out here, and we threw it on her."

I eyed the vodka bottle in my hand, turned back to the snake and wordlessly rose and stumbled out the door to walk the two miles back to the restaurant.

My last shift as a waitress passed largely without incident, until the Food Network's Emril came in and was promptly sat in my section. Thank God my hard-scrabble manager noticed I was wasted and assigned someone else to wait on him while I downed black coffee in the kitchen and avoided her piercing stares.

At the end of the night, two of my co-workers doused me with an economy-sized bag of flour and gave me a bottle of whiskey, a last-day ritual which I guess was a weird show of affection. They also tried to pour a vat of an unspeakable mix of tartar sauce, mayo, eggs and ketchup on me, but instead hit another girl with long, blonde hair -- who started bawling when it happened -- by mistake. Which I thought was nothing short of fantastic.

I'd like to say that my time in creole hell, spending every day smelling like crayfish and shame, made me stronger or better or, at the least, more humble.

But all it really made me was sure that I never want to have to work in a restaurant again.